I know by the calendar and the number of birthdays I have celebrated that I'm becoming a mature woman. It's no surprise and I'm not complaining. I love where I am right now.

I can travel and enjoy the scenery, the sights and the food to my heart’s content. By the end of the day, I'm not so tired that all I can do is collapse and fall in bed. I know what I like and don't like because I've already tried it.

I sure wanted to smoke. I thought those guys in the movies were cool the way they thumped that cigarette away as they made a definite statement about life, love or horses, or all three! If an actor was really peeved, he’d grind that butt into the ground as he exited, stage right. And who could forget Jeff Chandler’s command as he gave his men a brief respite in their trek across the Philippines in “Merrill’s Marauders”: “OK, men, take five. Smoke 'em if you got 'em!”

You can live in a place all your life and never really know all there is to know about it. I found that out when I lived in Oregon. I told a friend of mine that I’d traveled all over the Northwest, visiting everything from coast to wetland to mountains, but I’d not done nearly as much traveling in my home state of Georgia.

I was thinking of this recently, and decided to track down some little known facts about my current home state of Florida. Enjoy!

• No part of Florida should take more than an hour and a half drive to reach the ocean.

In 1996, Quincy was named an All-American City by the Allstate Foundation. The competition singles out cities that have been successful in identifying at least three problems facing the communities, which residents are working together to solve.

It seems as if no one wants to work together anymore to solve anything. The attitude seems to be that if things don't go my way I will do everything and anything in my power to be as destructive as possible. That is a shame.

The beautiful young lady that cuts my hair doesn’t listen to me. If I tell her not to take too much off the top, she clips and snips until it suits her. If I say leave my sideburns, I’m not into the quasi-modern shave ’em up past the top of your ears thing, she trims to her heart’s delight. When I remind her to thin out that thick, curly part that runs down the back of my neck, she just barely glazes it.

We asked our readers, and the community, to send us photos of their moms, as well as nominations for our Mother of the Year contest.

We got four responses.

Well...five, if you count the person who sent one in late that was about 250 words instead of the 25 words or less we asked for.

But even so, we placed those names in a basket, written on little pieces of folded up paper, and we had our bookkeeper draw a winner. And I attempted to contact the winner right away...last Friday afternoon, in fact.

On Saturday afternoon a little boy at Quincyfest was doing what little kids do, running, flipping and generally using up a lot of energy. I watched him for a few minutes. His mom tried to get him to sit still but all of that fresh air and the grass, seemingly begging to be wallowed in, was too much for the kid.